tocks "with a proviso of
mutual help."

The organization thus created has existed for one hundred and five
years. It has made a history. It has become ever greater and more
firmly fixed in and _on_ American society. It has made itself to be
the foundation of all things financial and political in the United
States. The story of the process by which this prodigious result has
been reached is narrated by Mr. Clews in the manner of one who gives
an account of the formation of a temperance society or a Sunday
school! In the whole article there does not appear a symptom of a
suspicion that the thing of which he gives the history is the most
dangerous and abusive fact that ever threatened the integrity of a
nation. The argument is that if twenty-seven gentlemen thus met and
created Wall Street, then the result, being a natural product, is good
and wholesome. But the inquiry at once arises whether it is valid
logic to suppose that what men do is right, simply because they do it.
The affirmative of such a proposition would make Aristotle stagger. It
amounts to this, that whatever is is right; therefore, let it alone.

By this argument of Mr. Clews all the tyrannies of the past, all the
horrors that have afflicted the human race, all the sufferings which
men have endured from sword and pestilence, from servitude, from the
butchery of war and the cruelty of the Inquisition, have been right
merely because they have been natural. Under this rule every monster
that has tormented society from the first day until now can find full
justification for itself on the simple ground that it exists! Under
such an argument a howitzer is as good as a plough, a sword is as good
as a sickle, a pillory is as good as a baby-wagon. By such reasoning a
shark is as useful as a horse. By this logic a boa-constrictor is as
good as a reindeer, a tiger is as useful and salutary in his office as
an ox or a St. Bernard, and a cancer is as beautiful as a blush. That
is, everything is good, not because it is useful and just, but because
it is.

Or again, Mr. Clews's argument is this: that the men who created Wall
Street were gentlemen; therefore their work was salutary. Just as
though respectable people could not engage in a nefarious business.
Just as though gentlemen could not, and would not, make a conspiracy
to enslave the human race. The "gentleman" is a very uncertain factor
in civilization; his devotion to right and truth requires always to be
teste